What’s the News: To much fanfare, Google has released a preview version of Google+, their long-anticipated move into the social-networking space dominated in the U.S. by Facebook, whose meteoric growth challenges Google’s dominance over the Web itself. The new service lets users send messages and pictures to each other, like Facebook, but puts more emphasis on grouping and communicating with different groups of people, as with email or in meatspace (i.e., the real world).

The two consensus early reactions (from the small group of people who have access) are that the service is mostly smooth and functional, a welcome change after Google’s social flops Buzz and Wave; and that it sure looks a heck of a lot like Facebook. Will that be enough to challenge Facebook, whose enormous base of users have uploaded much of their lives to one social network and may not want to invest time in another?

How It’s Like Facebook:

Profile pages that include info about you

A “Stream” of information incoming from contacts you choose, very much like Facebook’s News Feed

The homepages look very similar: top-level navigation tabs along the top, lower-level navigation menu on the left, Stream/News Feed down the middle, tools and widgets on the right

How It’s Not Like Facebook:

Google+’s Circles feature encourages you to create different groups to communicating with. Much of the discussion on the site seems to happen in large but not public groups. (The tool for putting people into Circles—the very un-Google-like production shown above—has drawn lots of praise from around the Web. I personally find it to be overly cute and swooshy, though it is entertaining that the Circles look, incongruously, like rotary-dial phones. The same thing can be accomplished in other parts of Plus by just mousing over someone’s name and checking boxes for the appropriate Circles.)

One-way adding: you can add someone to your Circles (i.e., add their comments to your Stream) without them adding you to their Circles. In Facebook, friendship must be two-way. In this, Google+ is more like Twitter.

It has an impressive group video chat feature called Hangout.

Small but potentially important and/or telling difference: when you look at someone’s Plus profile, you can see how many people they’re following (i.e., how many people are in their Circles), but you can’t see how many people are following them. Facebook can sometimes seem like a race to inflate your friend tally, which raises the question of what a “friend” really is. This may be why Nona Willis Aronowitz says Facebook says “Love me! Love me!” whereas Plus says “People I love: Let’s chill.” (Update: In a tweak to the service, Google changed things so that you can see how many followers each user has.)

While Google has a history of botching social products, Facebook is known for its history of making site changes that raise privacy concerns and then going half-way back. This is largely why some people might be happy with a Facebook clone that’s not Facebook, as illustrated by xkcd:

as a member of said “small special group”, I hereby demand a +1 button to click on

Jennifer Angela

No offence, but I think Google can do a lot better than that. I mean have some pride people, they think you are “like facebook”! That´s an offensive term these days. It equals stalker, privacy hater, crime supporter, freak and so on. Google may lose the so far sincere and respectable reputation it used to have, if it actually decides to create an internet network for weirdoes. For people who were unable to set up social networks in real life. And there is no excuse for being like that these days. You can join groups for people with special needs, youth groups, single parent groups etc. Google was like a safe virus-free online haven for people until now. How about stay the way you are? Proud, virus free, privacy respecting, sophisticated, self-respecting, modest and intelligent! Or in other words… The ultimate anti-facebook! This is my personal opinion. You don´t have to agree with me.

Anonymous

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I have to admit that the idea of organising people into groups I find very compelling. Right at the moment I don’t share my facebook page with business contacts. I suspect many others have the same issues that a facebook page is about your social life and you quite possibly don’t want to mix that with your business life. I think there may be a cultural aspect to this as well. In the US I think there is less of a divide between private and business life, here in the UK I think we tend to have a firmer divide. Whether that’s a good or bad thing who’s to say but it does impact how we view applications like Facebook from a business standpoint.

I’m going to be signing up for a Google+ account because I think this is a bold experiment from Google and I’m fascinated to see how it turns out.